The Very Viable Alternatives to Coal

As environmentalists we are often criticized as having no solutions to the problems we denounce. The opposite is quite true, as there are hundreds of different solutions which can play a part in helping to ensure our balance with ecology. Contrary to what the energy industry would like you to believe, the world will not be plunged into darkness, the economy will not crash, jobs will not evaporate, and we will not go back to the Dark Ages just because we stop building coal-fired generating facilities and begin building truly clean and efficient renewable and cogeneration facilities. There is absolutely no need for more coal!

Conservation

The cleanest and cheapest form of energy in the entire world is the energy that you don't have to use. Conservation doesn't mean cooking your breakfast in the dark over the heat of candles and then jogging to work. It means making intelligent decisions about how you use energy - to turn off lighting and other unused equipment when not in use, to utilize good driving habits and automobile maintenance, to refrain from taking unreasonably long showers and having thermostats set at unnecessarily high or low levels. Conserving means living your life without taking more than what is necessary.

Culture has a lot do to with people's attitudes on conservation. Vegetarianism is a great example, as it can take up to ten times as many agricultural resources to produce one calorie of meat as it does to produce the same calorie of plant-based food (which is often healthier to eat as well). Vegetarianism is often seen as "feminine" and "wimpy", especially in the United States where such culture is exacerbated by advertising for HUMMER and other "manly" articles. American culture has been taught to love loud, gas-guzzling, powerful muscle cars with 400+ cubic inch engines burning leaded gas, Harley-Davidson motorcycles with the mufflers ripped off, NASCAR, overpowered lawn mowers and weed wackers. I got a nice laugh from a friend when he saw the electric lawn mower that we purchased last summer. Though it is better than a cruddy gas-fired machine in just about every single way, it has not even been considered by the public on a wide scale due to these cultural norms.

It is interesting how the "Conservative" politicians in the United States are generally opposed to this practice, generally encouraging consumption especially of fossil fuels.

"Free Energy"

I define "free energy" as energy, most often derived from renewables, that we can take advantage of without spending vast sums of money or building large infrastructure to harness it. Some examples would be hanging your clothes out to dry, opening the windows instead of using the air conditioning systems, and using natural light through windows rather than electric lamps. This ties in with conservation - conservation often entails utilizing this "free" energy.

This "Free Energy" doesn't flow through any type of metering device, therefore it is very difficult to even gauge how much of it we actually utilize. The best thing we can do is to increase it, though no energy company is going to like that - because there's no meter ticking as your clothes dry in the wind and sun!

Cogeneration

Cogeneration is the simultaneous production of heat and electricity from a common fuel source. Instead of producing electricity only and then disposing of the waste heat (which consists of about 66% of the original energy in the fuel!), cogeneration plants produce both electricity and heat - capturing the waste heat and piping it to industries, businesses, and homes via underground hot water pipes in a system known as district heating.

Cogeneration results in a near doubling of energy-efficient over traditional separate heat and power production. The technology is as old as the steam engine, and it is well-proven, can be used with any type of power plant - even nuclear, and does not add to the cost of the power plant (think of how much they will save by not having to build those massive cooling towers!) Emplacement of the underground distribution network requires a long-term commitment by all involved parties. In this age of diminishing oil and gas supplies, a district heating network is probably a very good thing to commit to. Only cheap fossil energy, utility industry lobbying, and shortsighted economic policies have discourage cogeneration in recent times.

Hydro - Much Room to Grow

We are always told that hydro is "tapped out" and it is often excluded from the definition of "renewable". Hydropower is far from tapped out. It is estimated that there are 25-50 GW of hydro capacity available in the United States through small- and medium-sized projects. It is also a fact that only 3% of dams (which are actively impounding a water body) contain facilities for the generation of hydroelectric power. Why not retrofit some of these dams in order to get some 100% renewable, clean, and steady electrical energy?

Nearly all of the hydropower which is produced today is in "large" installations, with large dams and reservoirs. Smaller "run-of-river" systems allow lower-grade water resources to be utilized with lower environmental impact. Hydroelectric power is among the cheapest and most reliable sources of electrical energy. Current hydro production is two to four times cheaper than coal, and again there are no fuel costs - only the capital investment in the facility and operating expenses, which are minimal.

Also included in the hydropower family are wave and tidal energy which have huge potential as well.

See this Renewable Energy World article for more information about the untapped hydro capacity in the U.S.

Solar - Practically limitless energy

The amount of energy which falls on Earth from the Sun in thirty hours is about equivalent to all of the known conventional oil reserves, past and present. The only thing limiting our ability to use energy from the Sun is our willingness to move some applications to use its more dilute heat and light and/or to build collection facilities (power plants) to upgrade its energy to high-level heat and electricity.

Some types of solar power stations (concentrating solar thermal power - CSP) have the capacity to store the sun's heat overnight in order to enable generation 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Such facilities use well-proven technology - CSP plants have been in operation since the early 1980s in California and a new round of them are to be built. CSP is one of the technologies with huge capacity to replace the use of coal for baseload power generation. The deserts of the world offer prime real estate to site CSP facilities, with very high insolation and low levels of cloudiness.

The more familiar photovoltaic panels can be placed nearly anywhere - such as on rooftops, and convert sunlight directly into electricity with the aid of no moving parts, combustion, or mechanical systems. They are very low maintenance and can last for decades. PV panels and other solar technologies allow us to produce electricity when it is needed most - during the hottest, sunniest days of summer.

New (or not so new...) methods of electrical and thermal energy storage are allowing the more intermittent solar and wind sources to become a more dominate feature on the grid, running out one of coal's last big benefits - baseload generation.

Electric vehicle batteries
Redox flow batteries
Hot Water Storage
Ice Storage

Geothermal - Low-Impact Baseload Power

Geothermal energy is derived from the Earth's natural internal heat, and it is currently harnessed in areas where magma bodies are close enough to the surface to heat the groundwater to levels suitable for use. Geothermal energy can be utilized for heating - and where the water is hot enough - electricity production.

Geothermal plants are capable of producing baseload power with very minimal use of land, as there is no need for on-site heat generation or energy collection - the hot water comes up the well, ready to make steam to drive the turbines.

The United States Department of Energy believes that there is the capacity to produce at least 30 GW of geothermal electricity from shallow hydrothermal sources in the Western United States. If "deep geothermal" is included, this number rises to >1300 GW - which is several times greater than the entire current U.S. electricity needs and the equivalent of about 1,000 coal-fired plants.

Several different types of geothermal energy systems exist:

Hot Dry Rock - The "holy grail"
Dry Steam reservoirs
Hot Water reservoirs
Geothermal Heat Pumps - using the ground as a heat source/sink. These can be used anywhere in the world.

Geothermal Energy Potential in the United States
GEOTHERMAL ENERGY POTENTIAL - SEE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY REPORT .PDF (cbll.net | original link)

It has been said that if hot dry rock sources (hot rocks without any natural water flowing in them) can be tapped, geothermal energy would be quickly poised to become one of the world's dominant energy sources. The trick to tapping into these hot dry rocks is fracturing the rocks in way which allows us to create an artificial "geohydrothermal" system, as water is needed to get the heat from underground and into the turbines at the surface.

Geothermal energy is one of the cheapest forms of energy, its price per kilowatt-hours is nearly competitive with existing coal, and is probably cheaper than the proposed "clean coal" plants with carbon sequestration.

One of the disheartening facts is that the United States Department of Energy funding for geothermal energy is really nothing compared to such things as oil subsidies, military expenditures, et cetera. It was recommended by the White House in 2007 to set aside no funding for geothermal research - one of the most promising energy sources available.

Wind - Electricity from Thin Air

Wind is the renewable resource which has recently moved to the forefront of the renewable energy world, because the capital costs have been brought to a level which is very competitive with traditional forms of generation, and investors are more willing to invest in the technology for this reason.

The capacity for wind is immense, and like solar it comes with the added bonus of being a "distributed" energy source, where many wind turbines spread out over a wide area serves the grid with power rather than having a single large point of supply. This increases the reliability of the system through redundancy - the individual generators therefore don't have to be so expensive and 99.9% reliable like they do with coal and nuclear units. This allows individual communities, businesses, and industries to tap into the wind themselves at a reasonable expense.

Biomass - Energy from Waste

We produce billions of tons of waste products in the this country every year - We dump it at the curb and flush it down our toilets. It is produced in mass amounts by industry, agriculture, and logging. All of these waste products can either be recycled for their material value, nutrient value, and/or energy value.

Substituting organic compost for artificial fertilizer displaces the natural gas which would otherwise be used to manufacture nitrate fertilizers, and eliminates the need to mine and process phosphate and potash.

Many of these wastes can be used as fuel for energy production, such as the nearly 100 municipal waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities which produce electricity and/or heat relatively cleanly from ordinary garbage using high-temperature incinerators. Many wood-fired power plants also exist which burn logging wastes and other wood wastes from the lumber, furniture, and paper industries. Anaerobic fermentation of animal manure, sewer sludge, food processing wastes, and nearly any other organic waste stream will yield methane which can be used for energy production. Landfill methane is collected at a growing number of landfill sites and burned for energy production which mitigates the global warming effect of the methane as well as producing electricity and/or heat.

A rather large amount of wood is combusted in households across the nation as a secondary or primary source of space heating. Wood offers a carbon-neutral, rewarding, and even romantic option for heating one's home.

We are all familiar with the manufacture of ethanol (alcohol) from corn for use as fuel. The use of food crops for energy becomes very controversial, and I believe that most biofuel options will end up being from waste or non-food crops. Corn is a rather intensive plant to grow, and the corn ethanol process only converts a tiny portion of the corn's BTU potential into alcohol.

Nuclear Fission - It is better than coal!

...though probably unnecessary.

Energy from nuclear fission is certainly still an option for replacing energy from coal. One of the amazing things about nuclear energy is that a single uranium fuel pellet, a few grams at most, will produce the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. The energy is very concentrated.

Most commercial nuclear power plants today use light-water designs derived from naval reactors. These are certainly not the most fuel-efficient reactors in the world. There are several designs in existence which have passive safety systems relying on natural fail-safe phenomena such as thermal expansion or convection - not requiring engineered (and possibly flawed) active systems with human intervention. Some designs act as "fast reactors" which convert plentiful uranium-238 into fissile plutonium-239 for the production of energy. The levels of "burnup" in these other designs is also higher, increasing fuel efficiency and reducing nuclear proliferation concerns. Reprocessing of spent fuel is a way to get more energy from a given amount of fuel therefore reducing the amount of mining, high-level nuclear waste, and extending the supply of fissile isotopes.

I feel that it is reasonable to compare the nuclear waste dilemma with that of the carbon dioxide emissions from coal. Both are waste products with the capacity to do environmental harm. Nuclear waste in contrast to CO₂ is in the solid state, with relatively low volumes, and it undergoes exponential decay (the more radioactive a substance is, the faster it decays) to stable isotopes. Carbon dioxide is a gas in huge (billions of tonnes per year) volumes, which will in theory never decay or degrade in any way, unless it is taken in by some chemical or biological process.

Nuclear energy is not, however, our most sustainable and renewable option. It is still mostly a centralized energy production technology, difficult to localize, and still reliant upon nonrenewable resources, but it is one which has the capacity to produce energy with much less environmental impact than coal. Nuclear energy is in no way the cure-all that it is often made out to be, but it should in no way be forgotten.

In Conclusion

The idea that "renewables could never meet our need for energy" is a short-sighted, outdated perspective. Renewable energy, especially smaller-scale systems, has the capacity to incrementally and quickly add generation capacity. This is in contrast to coal units which require billions of dollars and years to build, and usually require all sorts of commitments, contracts, transmission line improvements, and other infrastructure to support their massive outputs. The amounts of energy available from renewable sources greatly surpasses what we could ever dream to generate from fossil fuels. Renewables offer a future-proof, sustainable pathway as well. It is simply a shame for all of the misconceptions and lack of funding for continued renewables development and deployment (and seemingly abundant funding for fossil energy) by our federal government.

We should also realize that simply adding supply is not the only way to deal with the problem; for much energy goes to waste (especially by coal-fired facilities' cooling towers!) which we should in the meantime work to capture and/or eliminate this wasted energy along with all of the needlessly wasted energy in homes and businesses and especially in our transportation system.

Last Modified: 06/10/2008
Created On: 06/10/2008

Why does CBLL.net Look like this?